TRENTON, Mo. — It took three years for officials to notice lead was seeping into the city’s drinking water.
Missouri regulators had given the green light in 2014 for Trenton to start adding monochloramine to its drinking water to disinfect it without the harmful byproducts of chlorine.
But by 2017, the city noticed something alarming.
Lead levels in drinking water in the northwest Missouri town — population 5,609 — had spiked.
Over the next two years, one-quarter of the homes tested exceeded the Environmental Protection Agency’s action level — 15 parts per billion — at least once.
The culprit, city and state officials believe, was the monochloramine. It likely corroded old lead pipes and caused the surge of lead in the drinking water. Because it hadn’t detected high levels of lead in years past, Trenton hadn’t been required to test for lead at residents’ taps since 2014.
Until the city got test results, “we just thought maybe it was kind of like an isolated spot,” said Ron Urton, the city administrator and utility director. “And then once we did the test and saw there was other elevated places, that’s when we started, I think, kind of figuring out what was going on.”
The 62 homes Trenton tested during that period have lead pipes, or service lines, running from the water mains, Urton said. But beyond that, very little is known about where lead pipes remain in the system with about 3,000 water meters.
Trenton has managed to get its lead levels back down again by adding a compound that reduces corrosion. But, experts say, the only permanent solution to stop lead from seeping into Americans’ water is to remove the millions of lead pipes that remain 36 years after environmental regulators banned new ones from being installed.
Therein lies the problem.
Trenton — like many other water systems — doesn’t know where all of its lead service lines are.
State governments have only a fraction of the picture.
And while President Joe Biden has prioritized removing remaining lead service lines, water utilities aren’t required to finish finding them for almost two and a half years.
“One the biggest problems we have is we don’t know where these lead pipes are oftentimes,” said Marc Edwards, a distinguished professor at Virginia Tech who helped blow the whistle on the lead crisis in Flint, Michigan, which began in 2014.
New lead pipes were banned at the federal level in 1986, and states came into compliance in the three years following. Water utilities have never been required to thoroughly inventory their lead pipes before a crisis. And only in rare instances are they required to replace them under the EPA’s lead and copper rule.
“A lot of people are flabbergasted that no one’s even bothered to try to figure out how many lead service lines there are in their community or in their state,” said Erik Olson, a senior strategic director for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Lead is a dangerous neurotoxin that poisons thousands of kids each year in Missouri, Kansas, Iowa and Nebraska. The heavy metal was used for most of the 20th century in pipes, paint, gasoline and other household products.
Since lead was phased out of gasoline and prohibited from new pipes and paint, lead poisoning among children has plummeted. But the U.S. has not historically mandated widespread eradication of lead paint and pipes, so the danger remains, especially in the homes of poor and minority families.
